


faces that you meet [there will be time]

by irrelevant



Category: The Old Guard (Comics)
Genre: Andromache of Scythia Swears, Barebacking, Dissociation, Except when I do, I don’t write porn, Introspection, M/M, Rimming, after the Schism, and smokes like a chimney, but it’s possibly based on it, comics canon, possibly, post Opening Fire, pre Force Multiplied, she is not ur den mother, suggest it and she’ll shoot you in the face, this isn’t history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:00:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26332282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: Moving on.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 25
Kudos: 118





	faces that you meet [there will be time]

**Author's Note:**

> i write for the comics, not the film. fair warning, if that’s not your thing.

I want something to live for.  
Right now, that’s  
the people on my team.  
(Andronika the Scythian, 2017)

  
  
  
  
  
He sits siddhāsana on the sand and watches Andy put Nile through her paces.

Andy’s got the axe out today, Nile a pair of knives Joe commissioned for her in Toledo. Nile has died four times so far, Andy once.

Nile comes back faster, stronger every time. She’s come a long way since Dubai. Soon, they’ll be able to move on without feeling like they’re leaving her and Andy dangling in the wind, bait for the next Merrick, the next madman to catch a whiff of their scent. (And wouldn’t Andy be so very pissed off to know they’ve factored her into their safety net equation.)

Halfway across the beach, Nile dies again, then gets back up again. She throws her second and last knife, impaling Andy through the thigh. It’s a solid strike with Toledo steel and Joe’s instruction behind it: goes all the way through, grazing bone if Andy’s recoil is anything to go by.

She says, ‘Athena’s _tits_ , that fucking hurts,’ and yanks the knife out. She throws it back at Nile, who snags it out of the air, wipes it off on her already ripped leggings, and slips it back into her thigh sheath.

Andy swears some more as her wound closes, a fluid combination of Joe’s eleventh century Masri and an archaic Hellenic language that sounds familiar, just not familiar enough for Nicky to understand.

He doesn’t need to. It’s Andy. Whatever’s coming out of her mouth, it’ll be unapologetically profane.

He’s heard it all before, so many times he lost count the year he and Joe met Andy. He tunes both her and Nile out, slides his sandals back on, and tries to remember if there’s anything left in the fridge that could become dinner.

Andy and Nile have moved on to some vicious-looking hand to hand by the time he curls himself up from the ground, brushes himself off, and stretches. His spine pops in satisfying succession all the way up from his tailbone.

‘Now that _sounds_ like it hurts,’ says Nile.

He opens his eyes to find them staring at him; he grins as he twists his neck just so for one last crack. Both of them shudder.

‘Jesus, that is so wrong,’ whines Nile.

‘I know, right?’ says Andy. ‘He does yoga. Nobody sane does yoga.’

‘Watch it,’ says Nile, ‘my mom does yoga.’

Andy’s smirk widens. ‘Wasn’t yoga your mom was doing last night with her face in my lap.’

‘Bitch, you did not just go there,’ says Nile, and throws a third knife neither Nicky nor, apparently, Andy knew she had on her person.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ Andy swears. ‘You little. Fucking. Brat, ow, damn it,’ she says as she pulls the knife out of her gut. She hurls it at the sand (it sinks in to the hilt), then digs a crumpled packet of Gauloises out of one of her fatigue short pockets as blood coagulates beneath the rip in her vest, sealing the mouth of the wound. ‘I hate you so god damn much right now. So much.’

‘Save it for someone who cares, crone,’ says Nile. ‘We going again or what?’

Andy looks up from lighting her fag. ‘Do I fucking look like I’m going again?’

‘Looks like you’re fucking something, all right,’ says Nile, tossing the knife she just retrieved hand to hand. ‘Then again, I could be wrong about that. Hey Nicky, when’s the last time boss lady got laid?’

Nicky holds up both hands and begins to back away. ‘Sorry, I’m going to have to bow out. You’re not dragging me into this one.’

‘Coward,’ Andy accuses.

‘Prudent,’ Nicky disagrees, turns on his heel, and walks prudently away.

From behind him comes a whoop (Nile) and a breathless grunt (Andy). Sounds like Andy’s braid just got pulled.

Andy growls, ‘Get back here, punk,’ and then Nile is cackling like some sort of ancient avian evil. There’s the sound of someone running.

Nicky chances a glance over his shoulder.

Nile is sprinting down the beach, laughing like a madwoman, with Andy right behind, axe raised. Andy’s fag is clenched between bared teeth. Her braid flies out behind her, almost parallel to the ground.

Nicky turns back around, lower lip bitten to keep his laughter in. He leaves them to it, and walks back up to the house and Joe.

-

They don’t fight. Not these days, not with one another. Not in the way most people think of fighting.

They disagree, they agree to disagree, and then they have pissed off, mind-blowing sex until one of them breaks and apologises.

Not this time.

Booker’s betrayal has been an isolating event across the board; everyone’s on their own side, even Nile. It’s not that they’ve never been betrayed before. They have. Live as long as they have, as any of them but Nile have, and betrayal is inevitable. This is their first betrayal by one of their own.

If it was up to Joe, Booker would never see or hear from any of them again, to say nothing of that testa di cazzo Copley. Nicky was unsure about the former, and fine with the latter, but Joe was also in favour of hunting Copley down and neutralising him permanently. When Nicky disagreed, there was no agreeing to disagree, there was only an arctic kind of silence from Joe that Nicky’d never before seen in him, not in all their years together.

It didn’t last long. Joe can’t stay silent to save his own life (that’s more Nicky’s job), or hold on to a grudge for longer than it takes his initial anger to fade. But ever since the emotional blackout lifted, he’s been off and on pissed off about what he calls Nicky’s willingness to let things slide. He chooses to ignore that in the end, he forgives faster than the rest of them combined, and that while Nicky may prefer to forgive, he doesn’t ever forget.

They’re family; they’ve been family for centuries. They will always be family. But just as no born human can choose their birth family, neither can those who come back from their deaths with shreds of other people’s lives stuck on repeat in their heads choose their comrades in immortality.

Nicky doesn’t kid himself about family. He witnessed, many times first hand, the various evils families such as the Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the Habsburgs visited upon themselves, and without the safe distance of a television screen between himself and the evidence that family is just one more dead weight to sink you: family will kill you if you let it.

Joe is not his family, neither born nor death-made. He was never of Nicky’s blood. He wasn’t a fragment of Nicky’s dreaming. He was the reality stood in front of him, sword held ready to strike. Enemy or ally, or something else entirely, he was and is Nicky’s one certainty.

No, Joe’s not his family. Joe is to Nicky all of everything it’s possible for one person to be to another person. He’s Nicky’s choice, every time in everything, life or death.

When Nicky says things always happen for a reason, this is what he means: they never dreamed one another, he and Joe, because they never had to dream. Dying together that first time was like waking up. After that, everything but them was the dream.

For nearly three hundred years afterwards, it was just them. Dreams of the others came and went, but as the decades began to pass more swiftly, they didn’t come as often. When they did come they were not... important. More a curiosity than a wish.

Andy and Noriko and Lykon did eventually get round to tracking them down, but even then-

Sure, it was pleasant to have companions who were like them. Pleasant to travel with their own kind, to know for certain there were more than just the two of them in the world. And training together, honing themselves on one another’s skills was, and is still, the strongest euphoria he’s ever known, aside from the shattered brilliance of the day and night during which he and Yusuf had killed and killed and killed one another as well as many other people on Jerusalem’s valley plain. They’d soon abandoned that in favour of getting the hell out of what is now known as Palestine, in between killing and, or fucking each other senseless.

Back then, there hadn’t been much to choose between the two. It was one century-long grudge fuck broken up into manageable segments, often with one or both of them drenched in the other’s blood, as well as the blood of anyone who’d been unwise enough to get between them.

There’s even something of a mythos born of their clash outside of Jerusalem embedded into the literary narratives of both the Levant and Europe of that time period, if one know where and how to look.

The most notable example originated with a scholar, one of the few from the city to escape both the massacre and Jerusalem itself on 23 Sha’ban. He wrote a short eye-witness account of two “foreign mal’akhim, one of them stood paladin to the Frankish Christ, the other to Islam’s Prophet, who came together to do battle on behalf of their Earthly adherents. And though they strove and fell, each of them again and again, neither was the superior to the other. And so the northern Plain adjunct to the City was laid waste, and I am now so told that none would approach Jerusalem’s northern gate for many days after they had gone, not even the one who would be declared King of the invaders, for fear of being struck down by these Beings’ indiscriminate Wrath.”

The scholar had gone on to detail the visions he’d been granted as he’d made his way to Damascus, where he’d been taken in raving, half delirious with dehydration and fever, and more than half starved. Given the circumstances, not much credence had been given either to his claims of warring holy messengers, or his subsequent visions. Not much, but enough, perhaps, to garner at least one patron who saw enough validity in them to have paid for them to be written down and put out into the world.

Yusuf had been the one to find and read the account; he’d run across it in 1257 in a second hand shop in Tangier of all places. The title was something improbable, something about new prophecies of the apocalypse, but it’d appealed to Yusuf’s dodgy sense of humour, enough that he’d given money for it, though not much.

Nicolò had come back to their rooms to find him in tears, he was laughing so hard. Afterwards, after days of sullen brooding had ended and weeks of nightmares had finally subsided, he’d thought that Yusuf had laughed because it was either that or weep forever, and he’d only managed something halfway between the two.

That first day, he’d only waved the book at Nicolò, made a few incomprehensible sounds, then fallen into near hysteria.

Nicolò took the book away and hid it. He’d taken Yusuf to bed (and had for once allowed him to sketch him afterwards), because there was nothing else to be done about any of it.

He’s reminded of that day now as he stands looking down at Joe, who is asleep on the common room sofa, his book collapsed in to rest on his chest.

This book is about Putin’s Russia. Booker had read it first and had had a lot to say about it, most of it excretory. After he’d thrown it against the wall and stormed out still muttering Gallic imprecations, Joe had picked it up. Part from sheer morbid curiosity, but mostly to have something new with which to goad Booker while they watched the game.

Nicky thinks of the last game they never finished watching.

‘You are such a masochistic moron sometimes,’ he sighs, unsure which of them he’s saying it to. He trails his fingertips across Joe’s forehead the way he does whenever he wakes in the middle of the night with Joe still wrapped around him but shaking, trapped within a Daedalan labyrinth of memory turned nightmare.

Joe shivers under Nicky’s touch. His face does this thing where it twists up into something that’s halfway between a smile and a frown, like he’s trying to decide if the stimulus he’s reacting to is good or bad. Then he opens his eyes.

They’re vague at first, still unfocused. His gaze drifts from Nicky’s face to the window over his shoulder, then up to the ceiling, before snapping back down to Nicky. Joe smiles, groggy and stupidly beautiful with it, and Nicky has to lean in and kiss him.

‘Mm,’ Joe says. He reaches up to wrap a hand around the back of Nicky’s neck when Nicky starts to pull away. ‘Hey,’ Joe says, still smiling a bit, and kisses him again.

The first kiss was relatively chaste. Just, hello, I missed you. I’m so damn glad you’re alive and here.

This second kiss is something else all together. Open-mouthed and almost too slow to bear, all slick and greedy and fuck I want you now.

The book hits the floor with a thud. Between Booker and Joe, various copies of it are seeing more life than books in general do.

Joe sits up, swinging his legs around and down, tugging Nicky in towards him as he does. Nicky goes along with the pull; he ends straddling Joe’s lap. He brings his hands up, carefully threading his fingers into Joe’s hair and tipping his head back.

Their mouths meet again only to part, separating on a wet slide of sound. Nicky tugs at Joe’s hair, which is coming loose from its tail. He pulls the hair tie free and drops it over the back of the sofa.

‘Getting long.’ Nicky tugs again, gently. He rubs his fingers against Joe’s scalp and smirks at his groan. ‘Want me to do something about it?’

Joe arches up under him, pressing his hard prick against Nicky’s ass. ‘You could do something about that instead?’ he suggests, laughter running through his voice. ‘I think the hair can wait, hm?’

‘And you can’t?’ says Nicky, but he stands and holds out a hand.

Joe allows himself to be pulled to his feet before asking, ‘Something wrong with the sofa?’

‘It’s cursed,’ Nicky says as Joe follows him out into the corridor, ‘Very old curse. Ancient. The curse of Andy walking in whenever she feels like it, and if the door’s locked, hey, there’s always the window.’

‘Sounds valid,’ Joe allows.

‘And we’re too old for necking on sofas,’ Nicky adds, then startles when he is suddenly taken hold of and tugged backwards to rest against Joe’s chest. Joe’s arms wrap around him from behind, holding him close.

‘I think you underestimate us, babe,’ Joe murmurs next to his ear. ‘We’ve done a lot more on a lot of sofas than just neck.’ He kisses the side of Nicky’s neck just below his ear, and Nicky doesn’t whimper, he doesn’t, but only because the sound gets caught in his throat.

Joe’s hands separate; one slides up under Nicky’s shirt, the other down past the waist of his shorts where they sit low on his hips. Joe’s hands are wide-palmed and long-fingered and always warm. They stroke slowly over Nicky’s skin, tracing the ridges of his abdomen, mapping the hollow distance between his hip bones.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ Joe says quietly. ‘Some then, I think. Not enough to be dangerous enough to trigger the healing. More after.’

Nicky makes himself stay still. Anything he does now will be the wrong thing, even nothing.

He feels Joe’s inhalation against his back. The exhale comes in warm gust over the nape of his neck. Joe says, ‘You were gone half the time whenever I’d come out from under whatever it was they kept giving us. What did that sick little fuck do to you where I couldn’t see?’

He stays silent too long. He knows it’s too long as well as he knows he can’t do anything to change it. His mind is a blank with bright flashes round the edges that he doesn’t want to acknowledge; he can’t seem to focus on anything inside or outside of his head, but he feels it when Joe begins to withdraw his hands.

Nicky reaches up and grasps Joe’s wrists, keeping his hands in place. He flattens his own hands over Joe’s, pressing Joe’s palms down open against his skin.

‘Don’t stop,’ he says.

‘Nicolò,’ Joe sighs, and nudges at his shoulder with his chin.

Nicky lets go and turns in his arms to face him.

Joe drops a kiss on the indent between Nicky’s collar bones. His hands clasp Nicky’s hips loosely; holding, but not holding him in place.

‘What do you need?’ Joe says against his skin.

Nicky shuts his eyes, just for a moment. He shuts himself off from stimulus, from Joe, who is always so much that he is sometimes almost too much.

Nicky says, ‘You. I don’t know. You.’ He says, ‘Yusuf,’ and he can hear the indecision in his own voice, and he hates it.

Joe’s talking to him, low and even. He’s telling him it’s fine, Nicky’s fine, he doesn’t have to know. Joe’s pushing the door open and nudging him through it, shutting and bolting it. Never taking more than one hand at a time away from Nicky’s skin. So long does it take Nicky to come back from where he’s stuck inside of his own head, he doesn’t at first realise that Joe has stopped touching him anywhere but his face.

He does come back. Nicky comes back. He will always come back, as long as it’s Joe he’s coming back to.

‘Nicolò,’ Joe says, cradling Nicky’s face in the warm cup of his hands. ‘You still in there, babe?’

Nicky makes a sound, something... he doesn’t. He doesn’t know.

Joe strokes Nicky’s hair back from his forehead, his eyes never leaving Nicky’s face. ‘I need some kind of directive, beloved,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to leave you alone, but I’m not going to do anything more than this when you can’t tell me no. If you can’t tell me, that’s ok. You know that, right? I’m going to let you be after I get you a blanket. Your skin’s like ice.’

Joe’s hands begin slide away from him again, and once again Nicky stops him.

‘Your hands,’ he manages, holding on to them, holding them to him. Feeling the whole of them against his skin: still too much, and it’s still not enough. ‘I want your hands.’

‘All that I am is yours to do with as you wish,’ Joe says. ‘You know this. Tell me where and how to touch you, Nicolò.’

‘Everywhere,’ Nicky says, strangled. ‘Everything.’ He pulls Joe in to kiss him.

It feels like consumption, and like being consumed, but still wanting, hurting for some undefined something that maybe doesn’t even exist.

He left his sandals in the front room and Joe was barefoot anyway. There’s nothing but shorts and t-shirts between him and what he wants. Those are soon gone with the slide of their hands over each other, and then he is falling backwards down to the bed, pulling Joe with him.

-

They’ve fucked.

Since Dubai, since Merrick and Ivanov’s lab, they’ve-

Against walls and in cars and on worktops. Muffling each other’s sounds with their mouths and hands so that Andy and Nile can’t hear and complain. 

In a cheap hotel shower with shitty water pressure, after they’d got out of and away from the glass-walled monstrosity that had been their cell. Biting into each other, teeth sunk into shoulders and bared throats. Fingers dug bruise-deep into vulnerable flesh, only to have those bruises fade within seconds, then be immediately replaced. Proving their survival to one another over and over in their most basic, base language: each other’s blood.

That is what they are, what they’ve always been to one another. This, what’s between them here and now; this is something new.

Nicky wants Joe to hold him down with his body, cover every inch of him with every inch of Joe, and keep them that way for as long as they can both stand it. He wants to disappear under him, into him, wants Joe to do the same with him, until they forget how to be two people. Until he no longer dreams of shelves of clear, labelled containers that hold every piece of him and of Joe, with no way to ever join those pieces back together again. But the worst thing by far is knowing that his and Joe’s individual awareness of everything that’s been done and is being done to them has somehow been preserved along with the rest of their pieces.

Nicky’s mind tells him it could never happen. His body knows something different, something glimpsed through a fog of drugs and pain. Something he doesn’t remember seeing when awake, but dreams about too often to forget.

His mind and body can’t reconcile what they each know, separately; he’s caught somewhere between, Joe with him, and now he arches his back, trapped between the bed and Joe, trying to get closer when they’re already as close as they physically can be.

Joe strokes him all over with careful hands, and Nicky holds on to him, unable to do anything else. Unable to communicate what he wants.

But he’s Joe’s favourite book: the only one Joe has never left behind; the one he still reads passages out aloud from every day. Nicky doesn’t need to speak for Joe to read him out, their private language written in ways and in places only they can discern.

‘Everywhere, everything,’ Joe muses, rocking slightly to nudge Nicky’s thigh higher over his hip. ‘But there is so very much of you, my Nicolò. I might miss a place or two, or overlook something important. Are you certain everything everywhere is a good idea?’

They are naked, pressed together from chests to ankles, except for where Nicky’s leg rides Joe’s hip. The slightest movement either of them makes is a full body caress. Joe’s cock is a thick, hard presence Nicky can’t ignore, slippery with pre-cum where it pushes against Nicky’s thigh; Nicky rolls his hips up just to feel it jerk and throb against his skin. His own cock rubs against Joe’s abdomen with each shift; he’s so hard he can feel the pulse of it every time his heart beats against his temples.

He could come just like this. They both could. They’ve done it many times before, rubbed off on each other until they can’t stand it anymore, until they spend all over each other then keep moving, slick with sweat and their combined semen, until they begin all over again. Nicky wants to do that, of course he wants, only he wants other things more.

He breaks first, which is rare. Joe’s the impatient one, the one who wants what he wants, when he wants it. The one who loves aspects of the instant gratification this century offers to many, if not all.

Nicky is a sniper, and a good one at that. He can be patient in the pursuit of a target, though patience doesn’t belong to his core self. Living so long has taught him the benefits of patience, and he was always a diligent student. None of the tutors his noble sire sent his way ever found fault with his learning abilities.

But he is not patient by nature and sometimes nature is stronger than self-taught restraint. Sometimes Nicky gives in and hooks an arm behind Joe’s neck, reels him in until their foreheads touch along with the rest of them.

He speaks in Joe’s native tongue, ‘You’re a tease, al-Kaysani, you always were. Give me what I want or fuck off.’

Joe’s shoulders quiver under Nicky’s hands, but at least he doesn’t laugh. ‘It’s only teasing if you don’t mean to follow through,’ he replies in the same language, then ducks down to suck kisses along the bared line of Nicky’s throat. He speaks against Nicky’s skin, ‘When have I not followed through? Remember Lakhnau?’

‘Which — damn you to all possible hells, you misbegotten son of an ass, don’t just _stop_ — which time in Lakhnau?’

Joe shakes with silent laughter and gently worries the join of Nicky’s neck and shoulder with his teeth. Nicky scores his nails down Joe’s back in retaliation, and says calmly, ‘This is not you following through, Yusuf, this is you pissing me off for fun. Which time.’

Joe leans back and looks at Nicky, his eyes bright with mischief. The curve of his mouth is mortal sin made flesh. Nicky wants to bite it, but there’s something-

Right. Lakhnau. He shoves Joe away and sits up.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Seven centuries after the fact, you’re still wrong. He was only-’

‘Offering to show you his etchings?’ Joe interrupts, grinning. On his back where he ended when Nicky pushed him, he props himself up on his elbows. ‘Not that I blamed him. If I’d thought showing you pornographic art would work in my favour-’

‘Shut up,’ Nicky says, and then he leans over and shuts him up himself, because he’s met Joe, and the only way to shut Joe up is to make him.

Joe kisses him back, but he pulls away faster than he normally would. He looks up at Nicky, his head tipped to one side, his expression distant. ‘You were pissed off then, too. Remember what happened later?’ He rubs his hand absently up and down Nicky’s arm, his touch leaving goose flesh behind.

Abruptly, Nicky does remember. He remembers all of it.

He remembers the man, one of his fellow travellers along the Path. He remembers an invitation from a friend, for that’s what he’d been, and he remembers Joe being curt; he was surprised, given that Joe was — unless given an explicit reason to be otherwise — courteous and charming to all. He’d let him pull him away with no more than the most basic refusal or apology given, though thankfully, undefined slights hadn’t been much of an issue where they’d been living at the time.

He remembers how angry he’d been once he’d realised that Joe was being a complete idiot.

He remembers-

‘Cristo e tutti i santi,’ he mutters, feeling his face heat to the sort of red only a ginger with whiter than white skin can manage.

Joe bursts into laughter. ‘You couldn’t help yourself, you were inspired,’ he says with a wave of his hand. ‘I’m quite inspirational when I decide to be, no? I would make someone a good muse, I think.’

‘The word is goaded,’ Nicky corrects him. ‘I should’ve reintroduced sense into your brain out in the field with my sword instead of... no. I’m not having this argument again for the thousandth time in seven hundred years. Yusuf, if you are laughing at me, I swear to you-’

‘I would never,’ Joe lies through twitching lips. ‘You didn’t need your sword to make me ashamed of myself, beloved. You were very forceful. And very beautiful.’ His mouth ticks up on one side. ‘It was hot.’

Nicky scrubs his hands over his face, wishing he could scrub his brain out as easily. ‘Did Nile tell you to say that?’

‘Hey, I watch TV sometimes,’ Joe says with a shrug.

‘You watch the game sometimes,’ Nicky retorts. ‘And you read the news on your phone when I send you links. I don’t think you even know what YouTube is.’

Joe looks thoughtful. ‘I think you sent me a link once? One of those blue underlines with all the weird characters, right?’ His eyes twinkle, crinkling up at the corners in a way that shouldn’t be attractive but is: devastatingly so.

Nicky huffs. ‘You like to pretend you know nothing about smartphones to see if you can make Nile’s brain explode,’ he says, ‘but the heathen Luddite act hasn’t worked on me since eleven hundred.’

‘Oh yeah, I know,’ Joe sighs wistfully. ‘You were so much more fun when it did.’

‘Well,’ Nicky says as he begins to slide from the bed, ‘I wouldn’t want to bore you. Andy and Nile will be back soon, I should-’ He stops as Joe’s fingers curl around his wrist, firm but gentle. He lifts his head and their eyes meet.

The look in Joe’s eyes is as gentle as his hold. As warm as his hands. ‘Is it well with you, my love?’ he asks in Greek.

Their Greek. The Greek that’d been the only language between them they could both understand well enough to use once they’d finally stopped killing each other long enough to attempt communication.

For Joe to use it now-

Nicky considers the question.

He feels more settled within himself. Less like he’s not really occupying his own body anymore.

‘As much as it can be right now,’ he says. He brushes his free fingers over the back of Joe’s hand. ‘I’ll be all right.’

‘I know you will,’ Joe says, ‘but you shouldn’t have to be just all right.’ He tugs once, very gently at Nicky’s wrist; an invitation, not a demand. Nicky doesn’t hesitate to take it.

Joe sits propped up against the pillows, sukhāsana. Nicky settles into his lap, tucks his face against Joe’s neck, and relaxes into him, feeling as though something that has been for a long time strung too tight inside of him has finally unstrung itself.

One of Joe’s hands settles at his hip; the other strokes the back of his neck.

‘Do you know why I thought of Lakhnau just now?’ Joe asks.

‘Don’t need to.’ He slouches farther down, propping his chin on Joe’s shoulder. ‘You’re going to tell me. You always do.’

Joe laughs, jostling Nicky where he’s leant up against him. ‘Everything, everywhere. That’s how it felt to me that night when you touched me. You were furious at first, but you still made me feel wanted. You made me feel loved. Then you made me come until I thought I would die in your arms, perhaps for the last time. It would’ve been worth it,’ he adds.

It seems arousal, at least, is still on the table. Nicky shifts uncertainly in Joe’s lap. He thinks he wants to rub all of himself all over all of Joe and make both of them come already, but he’s not sure if that’s what Joe wants. They’re both hard, but that’s nothing more than physical response.

Joe’s hands stroke up and down his back in long sweeps that move from his nape to the tops of his buttocks and back again, before settling on his hips, thumbs hooked over his hipbones, rubbing round and round them in slow circles.

‘I want to make you feel all of those things, the way you did for me, then,’ Joe speaks into Nicky’s ear. His mouth grazes the rim of it; a wet hint of tongue and an edge of teeth, and then gone. ‘Will you let me?’

It takes Nicky a moment to understand the question. Most of his blood has deserted his brain and settled in his cock. He forgets he has a mouth with which to answer, and uses it to breathe instead.

Joe tucks a hand under his chin and tips his head up to peer into his eyes. ‘Nicolò?’

‘Yes,’ Nicky says, suddenly remembering another part of what mouths are for. ‘Yes.’

‘Lie down for me,’ Joe says on that rough note that’s always sounded like sex itself to Nicky. It may as well be, the way his body reacts to it, drawing him up tight around the tingling stretch of skin between his balls and his hole, sparking outward from the base his spine. As though he needs no stimulus other than Joe’s voice to come.

It might even be true, he thinks hazily. ‘Have you?’ he says as he lets Joe rearrange him to his liking, on his belly with his legs splayed wide.

‘Have I what?’

‘Made me come with just your voice.’ He lays his cheek against his folded arms and looks back over his shoulder at Joe. ‘I can’t remember.’

Joe swears in archaic Ligurian, and Nicky almost comes then, just from the sound of his mother tongue rolling gorgeously profane off the tongue of the man he’s loved for going on ten centuries.

‘And you once called _me_ demon,’ Yusuf mutters in his own language. ‘You lie there, so quiet, so contained. And then you say a thing like that. Do you mean to drive me mad?’ His hands knead restlessly at Nicky’s hips. Like an annoyed cat with a toy that refuses to yield its shape.

Nicky is more than willing to yield, he’s willing to do almost anything if Joe will keep touching him and talking to him and just _doing_ things to him in general. ‘Do you want me to be quiet?’

‘No,’ says Joe. He says, ‘I do not want you to be quiet at all,’ and then he spreads Nicky wide with his thumbs, leans down, and puts his mouth on him.

Nicky makes a sound that will embarrass him thoroughly once his brain starts working again. Right now there’s no room in him for embarrassment; the scratch of Joe’s stubble, the press of his tongue is taking up all the space in his head. Joe pries him open on the thrust of his tongue and fingers, a slick millimeter at a time, and Nicky convulses around him, whining, incoherent. Somewhere inside Nicky’s head something snaps; around him, things just... go away.

He is sound and he is sensation, and they are currently all that he is. He is _loud_ , Madonna Santa, is he loud. He can hear the noises coming from his own throat, deep and guttural; combined with the wet squelch of Joe’s tongue sliding in and out of him, fucking him until he’s face down and all but sobbing into the bed, he can’t hear anything else.

Oh, his head is full of his own noise just as his body is full of Joe, and he just, he really needs to come. He grinds down against the bed, and it’s wet underneath him. He’s made it wet, his cock is smearing pre-cum everywhere, and it’s not enough, he can’t-

‘Joe,’ he says, and, ‘I need.’

Joe strokes his hands down Nicky’s flanks, as careful with him as he once was with his much adored horses. He licks into him once more, and once again, and then he pulls him up onto his knees, rising with him.

Nicky gasps at the loss: his hole is wet and loose and empty; he keeps clenching down on nothing. His cock dangles midair, no friction at all, which is worse even than the soiled bedsheet, which was at least _something_. He hears the familiar click-snap of a lube bottle, then Joe curls himself forward over Nicky’s back and pushes three fingers into him, a slow, steady thrust, and Nicky bites down on his bottom lip so hard he tastes blood.

‘Don’t,’ Joe says, ‘be loud for me, please, Nico.’ His fingers thrust in and in and in and Nicky says his name over and again, chants it like the brothers of the monastery near to where he was born used to chant their prayers from matins to compline.

Joe is Nicky’s profane, heretical prayer, and his praying, and the only answer to any prayer that he might ever speak. But the sounds coming out of Nicky now are no prayer at all, and though Joe may be immortal, he’s no god. His answers are wordless, purely carnal, and Nicky gives thanks for that in equally wordless groans when Joe skims his free hand up the inside of Nicky’s thigh to where his balls are drawn up tight and close with his approaching orgasm. Joe cups them, pressing in gently behind with his thumb; the jolt that goes through Nicky isn’t orgasm, but the next thing to it.

He drops his head down to rest against the bed, panting into the sheets, gripping and twisting them in his hands. ‘Yusuf,’ he says, his voice so hoarse he barely recognises it. ‘Please,’ he gasps as Joe presses in again and that lighting strikes through him again, bringing with it no relief.

Joe says something he doesn’t understand. Maybe it’s the language. Maybe his ears have stopped working. Then Joe says Nicky’s name and cups Nicky’s cock in his free hand, and Nicky’s already tenuous focus scatters.

Joe doesn’t grip or stroke. He only slides his open hand up from Nicky’s balls, up the length of his cock to the head. He circles with his thumb, smears pre-cum all round, massages it back into the slit. Then, _then_ he wraps his hand tight around Nicky’s cock and pulls just as he curls the fingers of his other hand perfectly inside.

Nicky sees white. Black. A void of silence and colour which is bursts of green and purple struck through pulsing red.

He thinks maybe he dies, though he’s not sure of it. His body turns itself inside out then snaps suddenly back together, and then the room forms itself up around him a piece at a time: the white walls, the window that takes up nearly all of a wall. The bed soft and firm at once under his knees and elbows.

And Joe. Behind him, over him, inside of him but going, his fingers sliding free of Nicky’s body, leaving him emptier than he’s felt in a very long time.

He realises Joe is saying his name, has been saying his name over and over for quite a while now.

Nicky licks his lips and opens his mouth. ‘I’m here,’ falls from between his too-dry lips, pushed raw out of his throat.

Joe’s breath catches; Nicky feels the hitched stutter of it where Joe’s chest is still pressed against his back. Joe’s hands go momentarily still before resuming their restless slide over Nicky’s sides and hips and inner thighs. Joe kisses the nape of Nicky’s neck, strokes the base of his spine.

‘Fuck me,’ Nicky says, still hoarse but less parched, and arches his hips back against Joe’s pelvis. He grinds his ass backwards onto Joe’s cock, and he groans; even that much contact feels ridiculously good. Joe’s so hard there’s no give to him, the length of him slick with pre-cum and the lube he used to finger Nicky open.

Nicky runs his tongue over the backs of his teeth, and then swallows, trying to generate moisture. He wants Joe in his mouth. Wants to use his tongue and his saliva, make him even wetter than he already is. Just drench him and then sit on his cock, drape himself over Joe and let him fuck him the rest of the way into oblivion.

That’s what he _wants_ but he’s not going to argue with less, because he really can’t. So he settles.

He settles for Joe riding the crease of his ass, sliding his cock up and down between Nicky’s buttocks. He settles for teasing pressure against his hole that’s not nearly what he wants, but he’ll take it. He’ll take Joe rubbing the slick head of his cock over and around Nicky’s hole, pushing in almost enough for penetration before pulling back. And doing it again. And again.

Again.

He’ll take it because it’s happening, as opposed to stimulation that would be better but isn’t happening, but he won’t be happy about it until Joe stops being the fucking tease he has been, and will be, and _is_ -

‘If you don’t put your cock in me now, I’ll turn us over and hold you down and fuck myself on you until neither of us can move.’

‘What a horror that would be,’ Joe hums, that innate thread of laughter warming his voice. It warms Nicky to hear it, or it would if he could just think for two seconds together. Then Joe pushes in again, inexorable, so far and no farther, and thought slides away again. The head of Joe’s cock stretches Nicky’s rim to the leading edge of pain but not beyond; Joe’s hands clamp down, halting the backwards shove of Nicky’s hips, and Nicky pants and swears and curses him and God and all of their works, severally.

‘In battle you have all the beauty, grace and fleetness of foot of a young gazelle,’ Joe says in his native tongue, way too coherent for a man whose cock is almost but not quite inside of Nicky. ‘You are Caesar when you command with only a look. But when you are like this, unable to speak but to curse my name, unable to do anything but groan and writhe and beg for my cock inside of you, you are the most exquisite thing anyone will ever see. You are beyond description, and I still find it difficult to believe you have chosen to give this to me.’

‘I can still choose not to if you don’t take it and fuck me already,’ Nicky gets out, his breath coming fast.

‘But would you, heart of my heart?’ says Joe. ‘Would you really?’ he says, and pushes in.

Nicky will never not love how this feels. The shove of Joe’s wide glans against the clench of Nicky’s hole until it opens up, until it unfurls and gives way. The way his rim stretches around the head of Joe’s prick until he’s sure it’s too much, that this time he won’t be able to take him. But his body is always the one to give, every time, and then Joe pushes the rest of the way inside.

It’s involuntary, how Nicky’s rim clamps down once Joe’s cock bottoms out, but then he does it again on purpose just to feel his hole cling tight to the thick cock inside him. Shocks of pleasure radiate outward from a point deep inside his pelvis, then Joe curls his fingers around Nicky’s hipbones and pulls him backwards as he nudges forward, little thrusts that do nothing but tease.

Nicky’s had enough of that. He grinds back onto Joe’s prick, a deep, slow circular grind that lights all of his inner nerves up. It makes Joe swear and jerk forward again, one hard jerk of his hips that rubs his cock directly up against the place inside of Nicky that’s too sensitive now, still tender with his last orgasm.

Nicky nearly cries as the perfect pressure on his overstimulated prostate drives him back up towards a second climax. He hadn’t thought he could come again; he’d just wanted to feel Joe inside of him, wanted to feel Joe come inside of him, but he’s as hard now as he was ten minutes ago, and getting harder. Joe grips his hips tighter, and then he is pulled back and up, until he’s sitting upright, his back to Joe’s chest with his thighs splayed over Joe’s bent thighs where he’s knelt up on the mattress. 

‘Like this,’ Joe says, and Nicky sees where he’s going with this and goes with him. ‘Yeah,’ Joe says, and still supporting Nicky’s hips with his hands, he thrusts up into Nicky.

Nicky braces his knees against the bed and his hands against one of his legs and one of Joe’s knees, and lets himself get fucked hard.

It feels so damn good. Joe feels so good inside of him, and against him, and around him; the physical pleasure of his skin against Nicky’s skin is an old one, but new, too, every time it happens, no matter how often it happens. Nicky wonders, not for the first time, how sex with Joe can still be this good after so long. He decides, as always, that it doesn’t matter why or how. It just is, they just are, and that’s all he needs to know.

He tips his head back, rolling the back of it against Joe’s shoulder as he stares blindly up at the ceiling while Joe fucks him perfectly towards orgasm. ‘Caesar or... or a gazelle. Hell of a weird... range,’ he manages.

‘Can’t decide... which I prefer,’ Joe pants, thrusting sharply up. ‘Perhaps... a thousand years more will... better inform me.’

‘Fuck you,’ Nicky says. The you all but explodes from his mouth on a cry when he comes suddenly, unexpected and untouched, with the abrupt shift of Joe’s hips. His semen spurts white up his own belly and he drops forward to hang suspended from his braced arms, his body jolting anew every time Joe shoves his cock in.

‘Nicolò,’ Joe gasps against his shoulder. He curls himself over and around Nicky more than he already is, presses open-mouthed kisses over his neck and shoulders as he stills and his hips jerk, his cock twitching in the tight grip of Nicky’s hole as he comes inside.

Nicky wraps his hands around Joe’s forearms, leans his forehead against the side of Joe’s head, and closes his eyes.

-

He lies on his back with his eyes closed and thinks of nothing in particular, or possibly of everything at once, creating a sort of whiteout in his head that nothing comprehensible can either penetrate or escape.

Joe is moving around in the room. Vaguely, Nicky is aware that he goes away and comes back: the door opens and closes.

Somewhere in all of this Nicky’s been cleaned up. He knows because he feels damp in many places, but not uncomfortable. The wrecked counterpane and outer sheet have been stripped from the bed; he’s not lying in a wet spot, so he doesn’t much care about anything else.

When the bed dips, he opens his eyes and turns his head to look at Joe, who smiles at him and leans in to brush Nicky’s hair out his eyes, his own eyes fixed on what his fingers are doing.

‘This is what I saw first,’ he murmurs, ruffling Nicky’s disordered fringe.

‘Mm?’ Nicky says, still mindlessly post-coital.

‘From up on the wall,’ says Joe. ‘Before the tower came too close, when the rampart gave and I fell.’

Just like that, Nicky’s pleasant haze is gone.

They walked the Great Wall back when it was still somewhat serving its purpose. Hadrian’s wall, when there was more to it than there is now in these latter days. They watched Berlin’s wall go up, and then come down again.

For them, there will only ever truly be one wall.

‘You weren’t wearing your helm,’ Joe goes on. ‘Carrying it around under your arm, idiot franj. I would’ve shot you myself, but I couldn’t make myself stop staring long enough to do it. I’d seen red hair before, and blond, but never like this, this gold and red mixed together.’ He strokes the strand curled round his index finger with his thumb. ‘You shone, Nicolò, like the gilded, rose-flushed dawn. Though to be fair, most of you was rosy, just then. Your nose was peeling as would a drying onion, flaking off in the sun.’

Joe grins like he’s getting away with something. Nicky rolls his eyes, then he rolls over on top of the love of his life and does his best to kill him for the however many hundredth time via asphyxiation by pillow. Joe laughs and laughs, and pretends to fight him off, which devolves into half-hearted wrestling interspersed with kissing. Which soon becomes just kissing. At which point, the front door bangs open and Andy bellows, ‘Nicky! Where the hell are you, we’re starving!’

Still smiling, Joe reaches up to stroke careful fingers along Nicky’s cheek. He looks up at Nicky with steady dark eyes, waiting.

‘Nicky!’ Andy shouts again.

Nicky sits up, straddling Joe, and turns his head to shout back through the locked door Andy will not be coming through any time soon, ‘Feed yourself this once, you’re an adult! Madre di Dio,’ he says as he looks back down at Joe, ‘more than fifty-seven hundred years older than either of us, and still she is an infant.’

Joe is laughing again; Nicky can feel the low rumble of sound under his hand as well as hear it in his ears. Joe tugs him back down and Nicky goes willingly. He sprawls out on top of him and rests the side of his face against his chest where he can listen to the reassuring static of his heartbeat.

‘Did you decide yet?’ Joe asks.

Nicky tips his head back to look at him. ‘Tomorrow?’ he says.

‘Sounds good,’ Joe says, and pulls him up into a kiss. He spreads his legs, cradling Nicky’s hips between his thighs, pulling him in and wrapping long legs round him in a way that is familiar and arousing and comforting all at once. Nicky’s been here before so many times; he began here and he will end here, whether any supposed god wills it or not.

They are still, hundreds of years later, an entity unto themselves. Much as Nicky cares for Andy, much as he has already begun to care for Nile, it’s time to be just them again, unto themselves, for a little while.

At least long enough to give both of them time to remember why other people matter, too.

-

He hears their voices coming from the kitchen as soon as he opens the door into the corridor. The smells of boiling pasta and some sort of white sauce, along with chicken sautéed in olive oil with wild garlic, mushrooms and thyme fill the house.

‘-didn’t think we’d be, like, stuck in the back of beyond on an island in the Mediterranean, or wherever, while you try to kill me as many times as you can,’ Nile is saying, her voice getting clearer the closer Nicky gets. ‘Spain was a hell of a lot more interesting. And less gross. I’m getting really bored with seeing my insides outside of me, ok?’

‘The Aegean, not the Mediterranean,’ Andy replies, her tone an eyeroll in itself.

‘I said, or wherever,’ Nile shoots back. She’s stood in a protective hunch over the hob, presiding over bubbling pots and a sizzling pan, but she turns to point a spatula at Andy. ‘I don’t care. Let’s go somewhere else. I’m ready,’ she says.

‘She is,’ Joe agrees as he edges past Nicky into the room. ‘Thank you for this,’ he tells Nile. ‘It’s nice for Nicky to have someone else around who not only knows how to cook but is kind enough to do so. I’m a disaster in a kitchen unless I’m baking, and Andy just refuses.’

Andy makes a derogatory noise, but doesn’t disagree.

Nile flushes and mumbles something indistinct, and goes back to prodding at her chicken. 

Andy says, ‘Like you’d know who’s ready or not. You slept all day with a book over your face then fucked Nicky into screaming incoherence. Sound carries around here,’ she says blandly when Nicky gives her a long, even look.

‘Hey,’ Nile puts in, ‘who do you think showed me those moves I used today? Took you down fast enough.’

‘Andromache,’ Joe says.

In a jerky motion that looks almost like resentment, she raises her head and glares at him.

‘Time to make a choice, boss,’ he says, not unkindly. ‘Nicolò and I have things we need to take care of.’

Nicky leaves the doorway, coming in to lean against the table. Andy turns her glare briefly on him before dropping her gaze to the floor.

‘What are you even talking about?’ says Nile.

Nicky and Joe stay silent.

Andy blows out a breath. ‘They do this,’ she says, grudging. ‘Take off after a heavy op. Go off and be them, together, somewhere without the goddamn baggage train. Sometimes for decades.’

‘You used to do the same,’ Nicky reminds her.

‘Since when have I got a reason to, anymore?’ she snaps back.

Nile looks back and forth among all of them, her eyes darting from Andy’s face, to Nicky’s, to Joe’s. She turns abruptly and turns off the hob, taking the pasta over to the sink to drain. ‘What am I, chopped liver?’ she says, still facing away from them. ‘Maybe I’d like to offload some baggage myself.’

Andy’s chin jerks up and around like it’s on a string that’s been yanked hard. She stares at the back of Nile’s head like she’s never seen it before.

Maybe she hasn’t. Not _seen_ it, as opposed to looked at it.

‘You guys want to get the dishes and stuff out? This is all pretty much done except for the salad, and that’s not gonna take long,’ Nile says.

Joe starts pulling out glassware and bowls. Nicky rummages around until he finds the cutlery; it’s in a different drawer than the one he left it in. Nile must’ve moved it.

Andy is still watching Nile as she would a rabid animal that isn’t behaving as expected. ‘You got something in mind?’

Nile glances sidelong at her. ‘Except for not here? Not really. Make me an offer.’

‘Go to Paphos,’ suggests Joe. ‘We’ve always liked it.’

‘You just like Cyprus,’ says Nicky.

‘First place we lived together without killing each other for longer than a month,’ says Joe. ‘What’s not to like?’

‘Biased,’ Nicky sighs. ‘Paphos is nice, but you’d probably like Crete better,’ he tells Nile. ‘Have Andy take you round the islands, then go find a tropical South American beach to sit on for a while.’

‘Is that what you guys are doing?’ says Nile, one eyebrow raised.

Nicky nudges her gently in the ribs as he reaches up to get the plates out of the cupboard. ‘That’s our business, kid. Mind your own.’ When her lower lip begins to lengthen, he gives her a lopsided smile. ‘We’ll be back. Sooner than you want, probably.’

‘I guess anything’s possible,’ she says on a dubious note, then something past Nicky’s shoulder catches her eye and she starts forward, one hand raised.

Nicky turns to watch her.

‘Hey, no,’ Nile tells Andy, who’s got a cigarette in her mouth and a lighter in her hand. ‘Not in here.’

‘Not like it can hurt us,’ says Andy.

‘Yeah, I just don’t want the ashtray taste in my food,’ Nile returns evenly. ‘Outside, or don’t.’

Andy looks at Nile. She pulls the fag out of her mouth and looks at it. Then for quite possibly the first time in recorded history, she doesn’t light up when told not to. She puts the cigarette and lighter down on the worktop and goes to sit slouched over at the table.

Uncomprehending of the magnitude of the battle she’s just bloodlessly won, Nile goes back to putting food on the plates Nicky hands her. It seems she’s not done, either, because she says, ‘Andy, don’t sit on your ass and expect us to wait on you, we’re not your cult from back when. There’s a tray of cut vegetables in the fridge. It’s ready to go, you can just set it out. You’re a grown ass woman who’s probably destroyed empires all by your lonesome. I’m sure you can deal with one platter of raw rabbit food.’

Grumbling under her breath, Andy gets up and trudges over to the fridge, looking put upon enough for three millennia-old women. Still, she obeys. And when Nile says, ‘Thanks,’ and kisses her cheek, she looks shell-shocked enough to account for every veteran of the Great War combined.

Nicky shares a glance with Joe over the top of Nile’s head. Neither of them laughs, though it’s a close run thing.

Apparently, they are now living in a new age of miracles.

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea where all the porn in this story came from. i didn’t set out to write it, it just happened, so... sorry?
> 
> also, i tried to keep religion to the level of two men who were raised in their respective faiths and are marked by that, but are not active in either of those faiths. i tried and i hope it worked, and i apologise if it didn’t. if something is hurtful, please tell me and i will try my best to change it.


End file.
